The Cancer Research Institute (CRI) has named Katie Campbell, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, as the organization’s 2020 Irvington postdoctoral fellow.

Katie Campbell

The fellowship comes with an award of $175,500 that helps support young scientists at leading universities and research centers around the world who wish to receive training in fundamental immunology or cancer immunology.

Campbell, who currently studies cancer genomics and immunotherapies in melanoma in the laboratory of physician-scientist Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, will use the funds to help further the understanding of what factors determine which patients’ tumors will respond to immunotherapy and which won’t.

“One of the goals of Dr. Ribas’ lab is to find important insights that might enable us to better identify better predictors of response and resistance to PD-1 immunotherapy,” Campbell said. “By analyzing next generation sequencing data from more than 250 patients, I’m hoping we can identify novel or alternative treatments for the patients who do not currently respond to current immunotherapies.”

The Cancer Research Institute, based in New York City, is a non-profit organization that supports research in using the immune system in therapies and potentially cures for all types of cancer. Established in 1953, the organization has invested more than $400 million in cancer research.